Confession: Yeah, I freaking like it!

Last night, I reluctantly performed one of my more uncomfortable “duties”. Inevitably, this occasionally-required chore leads to conflicting feelings of a restless desire to move my hips, absolute and abject annoyance and a compulsive need to bathe.

No, this was not a marital duty involving canine-named positions: I chaperoned a high school dance.

And yes, Readers, high school dances are still everything you remember them to be: grand examples of excited exuberance, saccharin-sweet romance, and awkward Pretty in Pink social gaffes. It’s generally entertaining and endearing to watch hundreds of youthful bodies letting loose in frenzied movements via the age-old pagan release of dancing.

Or so I think.

Many others—namely my bosses, some members of society and all who believe “Rush is Right”—think it’s sexually charged, dirty, naughty and faintly nauseating. Actually, I’ll give them nauseating—that many sweaty teens who have not yet mastered the correct deodorant-cologne-bodysweat ratio crammed into a confined area is really stinky. But it is not the scent that we, as the adult supervisors, are supposed to be concerned with (unless it is the pungent aroma of marijuana…a scent I can detect like a bloodhound. Must be from all those college days in Seattle…).

The problem, as depicted so poignantly in Footloose, is sex. Dances involve music, music makes young bodies move, moving young bodies is ‘suggestive’ and that suggestion is sex.

In my experience, teenagers do not need sex to be suggested to them. They always want it. If the average, healthy adult male thinks about sex every 10 seconds, the average healthy American teen thinks about it every 0.10 seconds. And that’s during an algebra test.

In fact, I have it on good authority that they not only THINK about it, they DO it. All of them. All the time. All over the place.

I know this because they tell me. As a very short individual, I am a great spy in the hallways. Students don’t see me coming and don’t realize when I’m there and thus talk freely. OH, the things I hear! I’ve learned not to share these little nuggets of teenage reality with my friends who have young children as they inevitably decide that either A. they’re going to home-school their children or B. they are locking their daughters in a nunnery. Starting at age 6. So, if you’re horrified that teenagers these days are just as horny as we all were when we were teens, don’t read on!

That disclaimer done, back to sex. The students have it all the time. Before school, during school, after school. In their cars, in the closets, in the bathroom. In a bus, in the dugouts, in a tree...

No, I’m not exaggerating. Our grounds-keeper often finds condoms in the trees. I can’t decide if I’m utterly horrified or reluctantly impressed.

And, unfortunately, I’ve witnessed the dug-out love in person. Several times. My classroom looks out on the varsity baseball field. On one memorable occasion, I witnessed a couple furtively sneaking into the dugout during lunch and summoned the campus police and administration. As the ‘reporting party’, they made me accompany them. We tromped over the field (this was during a mid-January snowstorm) and made our way towards the home team’s bench when the classic ‘bow-chicka-wow-wow’ beat of Porn reached our ears. Upon our arrival, we witnessed a naked girl lap-dancing her boyfriend—who had provided visual stimulation via a portable DVD player.

Yup, that ‘abstinence only’ policy of school sex ed is working REALLY well.

At least they do all seem to be ‘abstaining’ from using a bed. Honestly, you have to be in horrified awe of their creepy creativity, blatant bravado and stunning stupidity. I just really wish I could stop having to witness it. Contrary to popular belief, I did NOT enter the profession of educating the nation’s youth in order to observe them creating the next generation of the nation’s youth!

Thus, you can imagine my disbelief that, with all of the sexual adventures taking place amongst our teenage population, the thing we are most concerned with is the method of (mostly-clothed) dancing amongst our students who actually attend school-sponsored dances?

We must carefully interview all DJs and monitor their music selection to ensure no potentially offensive songs are played. HA! I challenge you to find ANY song that is NOT potentially offensive. Even the Beach Boys and their ‘California Girls’ is full of sexual innuendo and geographic discrimination, to say nothing of danceable hits like “Low”. The existence of radio edits helps, as public education tries to assume that anything played for free over the public radio should be fair game.

This concern over lyrics is silly, of course; the attending students’ i-pods—usually purchased and endorsed by their own parents-- are full of the most offensive, dirty music available. But the impossibly unrealistic expectations of public education versus the stark reality accepted, and even pursued, by the general parenting public is ever the ironic dilemma of public education and a rant I do not choose to engage in at this time. I’d rather return to discussing sex.

The biggest problem with high school dances—beyond all of the regrettable fashion ‘don’ts’-- is Freaking.

And I don’t mean the geeks, goths, shower-curtain-wearing, strange-piercing-sporting, awkwardly-dressed-and-acting pimply-faced Freaks who have roamed the halls of high school since the dawn of time.

Freaking is dancing. Specifically, dancing by simulating sexual intercourse. Grinding one’s hips, ass, crotch and chest against one’s partner’s hips, ass, crotch and chest in time to the hypnotically sexual-act-imitating, pulsating beat.

And this is bad. It looks sexual (because it is!) It looks like it inspires lust (because it does!) It looks fun…

Oops. I mean, it is a phenomenon that must be STOPPED! Teenagers are unstable, hormonally-controlled, volatile creatures who cannot handle the close proximity of the opposite (or same) sex without thinking un-pure thoughts, desiring un-pure acts and eventually sexually combusting.

Wow. I thought Footloose was a fictional movie!

Still, I am a dedicated teacher and employee. I was given my “NO Freaking” tee-shirt (pretty damn funny, actually, as it has a crossed-out picture of stick figures goin’ at it canine-style on the front) and my instructions to reprimand and immediately remove any student engaging in this perverted form of dance.

Thus armed with my thin, short-sleeved, 100% cotton cloak of authority, I climbed up on the nearest table, took an aggressive stance, crossed my arms beneath my breasts and prepared to enforce the No Freaking Law.

Huh. Problem. How the hell am I supposed to do THAT? The first problem is that they are ALL freaking (except for the actual Freaks who are doing an intricate and super-lame Irish clog in the corner). The second problem is that I have no way to stop this.

The only possible method I can think of would be to climb down from my safe perch, go into the gyrating mass of humanity and physically separate the horny freaking fuckers.

I do not get paid enough to do that. So I choose to fall back on the old self-preserving teaching standby: Teacher Blindness.

Administrator: facing the teacher, back to the dance floor. “Do you see any students engaging in the deplorable act of Freaking?”

Teacher: perfectly straight face, watching a female student grind her barely-clad ass against her partner’s crotch. “Nope. The kids are behaving themselves tonight. That Irish dance performed by that girl who is wearing what appears to be a shower curtain held together by her nose ring is really quite impressive.”

Administrator: still not looking at the dance floor. “Good. You make sure to stop anything the moment you see it. Can’t have the kids doing disgusting stuff like that. It’s sexual harassment.”

Teacher: observing the boy slide his hand up under the girl’s skirt as her friend joins them in what looks like a ménage-a-tois foreplay, impressively performed perfectly to the beat. “Of course. Disgusting stuff. I’ll be sure to stop it immediately.”

Administrator marches away. Teacher goes back to ‘chaperoning’ the orgy-porgy on the dance floor. Both are perfectly satisfied with this arrangement.

Because here’s the truth: we don’t really care. We have to PRETEND to care, to be self-riotously indignant that young adults would enjoy rubbing their nubile young bodies together. In reality, we all did it. Some of us still do.

And there-in is my real dilemma. I freak. All the time. I’m a ‘YEAH! girl’, a ‘WOO!!! Girl’, a ‘party-like-a-rockstar-all-night! girl’ . You know, the kind of girl who likes to let her hair down, her hem line up, throw her hands in the air and party, dance, and sing in ways that will hopefully never end up on YouTube.

I don’t do this often. Most of the time my hair is tamed, my dress is conservatively fashionable and my hands are only up when I’m diagramming sentences on the whiteboard in my classroom. After all, I’m a teacher in a small town. The wildest I’m supposed to get is a second glass of chilly chardonnay on Saturday night.

Boring.

I love dancing. I love dressing like I’m 10 years younger than I actually am, going to a slick dance club where everyone IS 10 years young than I and dancing in a completely uninhibited fashion with my husband, my girl friends, my girlfriends’ husbands and any one else in the vicinity.

And I don’t clog. I don’t swing dance. I don’t do the fox trot. I do not maintain an appropriate bubble of personal space.

Nope. I freak. And I freaking like it.